A positive user experience makes a positive profit
There’s a reason that the seemingly age-old saying “the customer is king” still rings true in the modern economy: ultimately, the customer keeps your business afloat. No matter how good the products or services are that you’re selling, if no one is buying, your business won’t succeed. As such, it’s essential to put the customer, and their user experience, at the centre of your business strategy to ensure they have a positive journey with your business.
Organisations that fail to achieve this risk losing sales, business opportunities, and revenue. While it can be tempting to say that the products or services you offer will speak for themselves, the truth is that the experience your customer has with your business can have a significant impact on the success of a sale. And, your relationship with a potential customer starts long before they even see or experience what you’re selling.
It’s evident that salesmanship is still critical in business; however, while personal experiences still influence sales, the customer journey and buying has also moved away from solely in-person selling towards the digital sphere. In fact, business buyers spend only 17 per cent of their time meeting with potential suppliers when making a purchase¹. As such, you now need to rely on more than just your salespeople, their expertise, and their personality. Instead, your website and digital channels must also do the talking.
That means, if your customer has a bad online experience, they may not make it to the next stage of the sales funnel with you. So, it’s important that you prioritise the user experience and make it a core part of your customer experience strategy.
Enhancing the customer experience strategy: prioritising the customer journey
As the business experience becomes increasingly digitised, and organisations invest more in their digital transformations, the customer journey has also evolved. Now, potential buyers spend more time than ever researching online before making decisions. According to Gartner, 83 per cent of business-to-business (B2B) buyers prefer to order or pay through digital commerce².
To secure business opportunities and sales, the digital customer journey must be both seamless and straightforward. Put simply, your website and supporting digital channels—regardless of whether they’re paid, earned, or owned media—must have clear messaging, be easy to navigate, and prioritise the user experience above (almost) everything else.
Your current and potential future customers must be able to get the information they need, when they need it. If the customer journey isn’t clear, and the user experience is too difficult, your customers might seek support and solutions elsewhere. Delivering frictionless digital experiences is essential.
For the best chance of success, it’s important that you consider the customer journey map, including every touchpoint a potential buyer has with your business online. This will help you better understand the user experience and, more importantly, how you can improve it to secure more sales.
Understanding the user experience: the benefits of a UX audit
Websites and digital channels are critical to support today’s businesses. They’ve become an essential hub, hosting a wealth of information about your company, and its products and services, to help demystify the buying process for customers. However, it’s important to remember that not all websites are created equal.
A simple interface can make it easy for users to find the things they need, but they also might lack the requisite information to support the buying journey, as well as miss the mark when it comes to user engagement. Comparatively, a flashy website might capture the user’s attention, but be overly complex and make it challenging to find what they need. To further complicate the user experience, your messaging might be confusing or jargon-heavy, so, even if they can find the information they need, your customer may not be able to understand it.
Conducting a website user experience audit, or UX audit, can help you better understand your strengths and weaknesses across your website. More importantly, they can help you identify areas where you can improve the user experience design, strengthen your customer journey map, and ultimately improve the digital sales process to drive more business success.
However, the benefits of a UX audit don’t end there. For the best chance of success, it’s important to evaluate your entire digital presence, going beyond your website. This includes assessing your social media platforms, online reviews, paid marketing campaigns, and other third-party digital properties. To achieve this, you should invest in a comprehensive UX audit which will let you deep dive into your digital channels to give you a more holistic understanding of your entire digital footprint and highlight any gaps or weak spots in the customer journey that you need to address.
Bridging the user experience gap: working with the professionals
Many organisations can easily lose sight of the need to prioritise the user experience and may have trouble understanding why their digital channels are difficult to navigate. It’s easy to understand how this happens; business leaders and internal teams are generally so intimately familiar with their digital assets and processes that they can’t see what’s not working because they already know exactly where to find and access the information they want.
Investing in the services of an experienced third-party UX audit provider will help you to bridge this gap and uncover areas of improvement across your entire digital footprint to improve audience engagement and drive sales opportunities.
You’ll be able to:
- grow the number and duration of website visits by enhancing your digital performance
- improve your target audience engagement by optimising social media and digital channel engagement
- increase leads generated through improved online interactions.
Outsource—part of The Recognition Group, Australia’s leading group of marketing and public relations (PR) specialists—offers a comprehensive 360-degree digital UX audit that will assess how your brand is positioned across paid, earned, and owned digital channels.
For more information on how Outsource can help your business optimise the digital user experience and strengthen your customer experience strategy to drive more sales, contact the team today.
Bibliography:
[1] https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey
